Giving Spark Mail a Try

March 25, 2017

Table of Contents

I love email. In spite of its faults, email is the most reliable way to
communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. It’s been this way for decades. It
works.

Email is also a pain in the ass. Email puts anyone at all in charge of my todo
list. Clients forward me 30-message email threads with only “Thoughts?”. Spam.
Reply-all nonsense. You know the list. We’ve been bitching about email for
years. People keep trying to “fix” it or replace it. Good luck with both of
those. I’m perfectly comfortable with email. I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

That said, I love to play with different approaches to email. In the past couple
of years I’ve switched between native Gmail web, Apple
Mail, Mailmate, Mutt,
and Mu4e.

Today I’ve been trying Spark to see if any of the
modern approaches to email are useful. First impressions are positive. We’ll see
how “smart” the smart inbox is. I forward all of my email accounts
to Fastmail so multiple-account features aren’t useful
to me. I like “snooze”. Not sure about “Pin” vs “Flag”. It’s new and shiny and
I’m having fun with it.

The thing I may not be able to live with is not having easy access to individual
emails. I can’t seem to drag and drop emails into, say DEVONthink. I also don’t
see a way to link directly to a message. I use links to email everywhere so
that could be a deal breaker.

In the meantime, Spark seems clever and pretty. I’ll see how I feel in a week or
two.